• Hynek Boril, Ph.D.


      Associate Professor

      Electrical and Computer Engineering Department

      University of Wisconsin-Platteville

Research


Current Projects

Robust Speech Recognition in Adverse Environments

  • Data-driven front-end optimization
  • Unsupervised frequency/cepstral domain normalization of variations due to Lombard effect, whisper, noise, and channel
  • Improved back-end modeling of speech in noise utilizing codebooks of multi-environmental noisy models
  • Talking style/SNR/environment detection, improved scoring strategies in GMM-based multi-hypothesis testing
  • Mathematical modeling of noisy speech distributions in cepstral domain

Arabic Dialect and Chinese Sub-Language Identification

  • Acoustic assessment and automatic classification of Iraqi, Gulf, Levantine, and Egyptian Arabic dialects
  • Automatic classification of Chinese sub-languages (dialects)
  • Parallel phone recognition and statistical (PPRLM)/support vector machine (PRSVM) language modeling

Limited Resource Speech Recognition for Nigerian English

  • Study of acoustic-phonetic differences in Nigerian English (NE) and American English (AE)
  • Fast adaptation of AE based ASR to NE using limited resources

Cognitive Load/Emotion Classification in Drivers (Part of UTDrive Project)

  • Driver's cognitive load/emotion classification
  • Assessment of speech dialog systems using multi-modal cognitive load analysis

Study of the Development of Infant Speech Production (Collaboration with LENA Foundation)

  • Comaprative analysis of speech development in US and Chinese toddlers
  • Longitudinal analysis of speech production parameters
  • Automatic age classification

Prosody Modeling

  • Statistical description of pitch contours utilizing codebook of pitch primitives
  • Application of pitch contour features to dialect distance assessment

Awards

  • 2017 - Principal Investigator (PI), “Pioneer Speech Signal Processing Lab (PSSPL)-Lab Travel Support”, Pioneer Academic Center for Community Engagement & CenterPoint, Fall'17, UW-Platteville ($6,975)
  • 2016 - Principal Investigator (PI), “Pioneer Speech Signal Processing Lab (PSSPL)-Research Equipment Acquisition and Lab Travel Support”, Pioneer Academic Center for Community Engagement, Spring & Fall'16, UW-Platteville ($9,604)
  • 2015 - Principal Investigator (PI), “Acoustic Analysis for Automatic Speaker Identification, Emotional State/Cognitive Load Assessment, and Audio Event Detection”, EMS New Faculty Start-Up Grant, UW-Platteville ($10,000)
  • 2013 - ICASSP-13 IBM Research Spoken Language Processing Student Travel Grant for Outstanding Paper in the Spoken Language Processing Area, non-student co-author [T. Hasan, O. Sadjadi, G. Liu, N. Shokouhi, H. Boril, J. H. L. Hansen, “CRSS systems for 2012 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP'13), Vancouver, Canada, May 2013]
  • 2010-2012 - Co-PI, “Non-Native Speaker Systems: Analysis and Development of Automatic Recognition for Non-Native Speakers”, US Army through Subcontract to Li Creative Technologies (Florham Park, NJ), $100,000
  • 2006 - Principal Investigator (PI), “Normalization of Lombard Effect”, Siemens Corporate Technology (Munich, Germany), € 10,000, 1/1/2006 - 9/1/2006
  • 2006 - POSTER'06 - 10th International Student Conference on Electrical Engineering, Prague - awarded paper
  • 2005 - Interspeech'05 Student Travel Grant (ISCA)
  • 2005 - Comprehensive Doctoral Examination - Passed with Honors
  • 2003-2007 - Research Assistantship at Department of Circuit Theory, CTU FEE

External Reviewer

  • U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of University Programs{Criminal In- vestigations and Network Analysis (CINA)
  • Dutch Research Council/Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Talent Programme-Veni Scheme
  • Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment of New Zealand (MBIE) Science Investment Round
  • Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
  • IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)
  • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC)
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC)
  • IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII)
  • IEEE Signal Processing Letters (SPL)
  • ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
  • Speech Communication (Elsevier)
  • Digital Signal Processing (Elsevier)
  • Computer Speech and Language (Elsevier)
  • Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier)
  • Engineering Science and Technology, International Journal (Elsevier)
  • Knowledge-Based Systems (Elsevier)
  • EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing
  • International Journal of Tomography & Statistics
  • IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
  • IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM)
  • IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)
  • IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT)
  • IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS)
  • ISCA INTERSPEECH Conference
  • Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention
  • European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO)
  • Odyssey: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop
  • Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI)
  • International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII)
  • Book Review - Skarnitzl, R. et al. (2015), Phonetic Speaker Identification [Foneticka identifikace mluvciho], FF UK Publishing House, Prague
  • Book Review - Pavel Machac & Radek Skarnitzl (2009), Principles of Phonetic Segmentation, Epocha Publishing, Prague.

Independent Expert

  • Two Patent Infringement Cases in the Field of Automatic Speech Recognition and Speaker Recognition
  • Two Patent Validity Reexamination Cases in the Field of Automatic Speech Recognition
  • A Voice Forensics Case
  • Feasibility/Reliability Study of Gunshot Detection Systems

Service on Committees

  • Journal Guest Editor: Recent Advances in Audio and Image based HCI on Mobile Devices (Eds. G. Liu, H. Bo{\v r}il, Z. Zhang, Q. Wang, M. Ding), Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2017
  • Editorial Advisory Board: (Book) Technologies for Inclusive Education: Beyond Traditional Integration Approaches (Eds. D. Griol, Z. Callejas, R. L. Cozar), IGI Global, 2012
  • Technical Committee: LISTA Workshop on Natural and Synthetic Modification of Speech in Response to Listening Conditions, Edinburgh, UK, May 2--3, 2012

Conference Session Chair

  • ISCA INTERSPEECH 2021: Oral session ''Voice Activity Detection''
  • ISCA INTERSPEECH 2019: Poster session ''Speaker Recognition 3''
  • ISCA INTERSPEECH 2018: Oral session ''Language Identification''
  • IEEE ICASSP 2018: Poster session ''Robust Speech Detection''
  • ISCA INTERSPEECH 2017: Oral session ''Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement''

Professional Memberships (Past/Current)

  • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) - Affiliate Member
  • International Speech Communication Association (ISCA)
  • European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP)
  • European Center of Excellence in Speech Synthesis (ECESS)

Past Projects (Before Joining CRSS)

Projects & Evaluation Campaigns - Individual Participation

  • 2006 - Principal Investigator (PI), “Normalization of Lombard Effect”, Siemens Corporate Technology (Munich, Germany), € 10,000 ($15,000), 1/1/2006 - 9/1/2006
  • 2006 - European Center of Excellence on Speech Synthesis (ECESS) - First ECESS PDA/PMA Evaluation Campaign (2006) - Design and Evaluation of Pitch Tracker

European Union Projects - Research Group Member

  • 2006 - IST-2001-32216 - Lexica and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation Components (LC-STAR II)
  • 2005 - COST 278 - Spoken Language Interaction in Telecommunication
  • 2003 - IST-1999-10003 - Speech-driven Interfaces for Consumer Devices (SPEECON)

Czech Science Foundation Grants - Research Group Member

  • 2005 - 2007 - GACR 102/05/0278 - New Trends in Research and Application of Voice Technology
  • 2004 - 2007 - 1ET201210402 - Voice Technologies in Information Systems
  • 2003 - 2006 - GACR 102/03/H085 - Biological and Speech Signals Modeling

Czech Government Projects - Research Group Member

  • 2005 - 2007 - MSM 6840770014 - Research in the Area of the Prospective Information and Navigation Technologies

Industry Projects - Group Member

  • 2005 - TEMIC SDS - Speech database processing
  • 2004 - TEMIC SDS - Acquisition of car speech database (CZKCC)

 

Last Updated 3-12-2022